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What is a belief you’ve done a total 180 on? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 3 days ago by sveltecider@lemmy.ca to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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I used to be strictly materialist and atheist. Now I’m pretty spiritual. Don’t necessarily follow a religion and don’t support bigotry but yeah, I’m fairly spiritual now. This is a recent development and I never thought I’d be here like 5 years ago.

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[-] ICastFist@programming.dev 27 points 2 days ago

That a dictatorship led by a "good, strong leader" would be enough to fix any country. Held that belief from ages 16-22. With time, I understood that it would devolve into a bad strong leader anyway, especially because any one single person cannot realistically do everything at such a large scale, nor can they ensure that everyone down the chain of command is "good". Paranoia would seep in, more and more resources would be spent hunting "the bad ones", innocents would be wrongfully accused either by honest mistake or by malicious enemies.

Nowadays, I really enjoy the idea of "Do not take for yourself any power that you would loathe your worst enemy to have" and I wish it could be applied to all levels of politics.

[-] barryamelton@lemmy.world 12 points 2 days ago

"Rules for rulers" video from CGP Grey summarizes this nicely. The book it is based on should be mandatory reading.

this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2026

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